


hoist the sails to brave the crashing waves

by glissandostrings (salaciastardust)



Category: Hunger Games (2012), Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, implied or one-sided relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-26
Updated: 2013-12-26
Packaged: 2018-01-06 05:52:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1103178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salaciastardust/pseuds/glissandostrings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Johanna Mason slowly came to know Finnick Odair.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hoist the sails to brave the crashing waves

Johanna knows Finnick Odair because, well, everyone in Panem knows Finnick Odair. The golden boy of the fishing district. Some sort of sea god who had ascended from the ocean, fourteen and bright-eyed, and had sauntered into the arena to win over everyone's hearts, win the Hunger Games by the power of the pretty. A bona fide casanova now, after winning the Games six years ago, with more ex-lovers left behind in the Capitol than people in Johanna's village. A preening peacock, feathers dripping with saltwater and dried by the wind.  
  
They hate him in District 7. He's a Career, who went on to as good as become a Capitol man. Nonetheless, many girls can't help but let their eyes linger whenever he's on screen.  
  
Johanna just scowls and stalk into the woods to cut down some branches. He's too Capitol for her.  
  
When she first sets foot in the Capitol, faced by a sea of outlandishly decorated and cut-up faces speaking in stilted accents, she first starts to think Finnick Odair wasn't as Capitol as she thought.  
  
\---------------------------------------------  
  
Johanna meets him during the Victory Tour, time she had hoped to spend seeing more of Panem instead wasted in prep and long, long train rides. She gets to District 4, all the way on the west coast of Panem, and there's a feast on a long outdoors table only a few yards away from where the ocean laps at pale sand. Johanna goes barefoot, because when else would she be able to feel the sand beneath her toes? It is in this state, shivering slightly at the cold ocean winds and rubbing her toes together, that she first sees Finnick Odair in person.  
  
He's taller than she thought he would be, she dimly notes.  
  
Finnick Odair is, of course, the life of the party. Why wouldn't he be? He weaves in and out of conversation armed with jokes and ridiculous stories, grins at Johanna ruefully in-between courses. She gapes at how easily socialization and conversation comes to him, and her eyes start following him, to her own chagrin.  
  
It is how she observes that Finnick Odair's golden smile doesn't quite reach his sea-green eyes, there's a set to his jaw and a rigidness to his shoulders if you know where to look.  
  
Johanna realizes that maybe not everyone in Panem knows Finnick Odair.  
  
\---------------------------------------------  
  
After the fishing district is the electronics and robots district, then the stone district, then the jewelry district, then the Capitol itself. Johanna hated it before her Games, and she hates it now. The clothes on one person's body could feed a family in District 7 for a week, and in poorer districts like 11 or 12, much longer than that.  
  
She masks her hatred in sharp, cutting wit and sarcastic remarks and jokes. Everyone loves it.  
  
President Snow asks to see her. Johanna strides in, thinking what could he possibly say to her that will surprise her? It's over. She won.  
  
As it turns out, there's a lot he could say to her.  
  
She emerges trembling and scared and  _whathaveIdonewhathaveIdonewhathaveIdone_  echoing in her mind, and the image of President Snow's pale fingers idly playing with a photo of Pine flickering in front of her eyes every time she closes her eyes.  
  
\---------------------------------------------  
  
There's a party in District 7. Her family doesn't come, but they never had liked things like that.  
  
She reaches her fancy house in the Victor's Village, and finds out it's because her family is dead.  
  
She drops the plastic container she'd brought, full of leftovers from the feast, and screams.  
  
\---------------------------------------------  
  
Not everyone in her family is dead, she discovers. Her mother had only been dying, an illness having crashed down upon her like the tree that had killed her father and brother. It's not a natural illness, doesn't even pretend to be.  
  
There's no point, Johanna supposes.  
  
After Leanna Mason does die, coughing up blood and eyes wide and panicked with words she couldn't say, Johanna starts thinking. She has a lot of time for thinking, now.  
  
It clicks one night, when she wakes up screaming from a nightmare involving her arena, and her mother and father and Pine, and President Snow, and Finnick Odair and the drunk victor from District Twelve.  
  
 _Nobody_  in Panem knows Finnick Odair.  
  
\---------------------------------------------  
  
The next time they meet in person, it's in the Victor's Lounge. The 72nd Hunger Games have begun.  
  
Johanna glances at Finnick Odair, eyes uncharacteristically nervous, across a sea of nervous chatter and a clinking of bottles.  
  
He grins slow and lazy and, behind all of that crap, kind of warm.  
  
Nobody in Panem knows Johanna Mason, either. But she thinks that maybe two people whom nobody knows can end up knowing each other.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on mass crossover forum roleplay site Pandora, where I play Johanna.


End file.
